CPL.Luke

I figured you would say the cold war but it should be noted that at no point did the war involve all parts of the world simultaneously, and I would object to it being called a "ww3"

where was ww3?

I would highly doubt that the US or the UN would ever set foot in somalia again after what happened in 92. lucky for us these islamic states can't pose a huge threat to us over here, as the technological and economic gap between the west and the countries heading towards islamic fascism is great enough that they could never pose a serious military threat to us. The only thing they can do is cut off our oil, and even that shouldn't effect us 5-10 years from now.

^its actually done all the time, take QM, QFT, the standard model etc. Mowgli kkris1 made a mistake somewhere, like the others on this forum I know that because we've seen people come on here with these long drawn out though experiments involving 10 different things in ten different ways. THey essentially are constructing a problem thats very very tedious and easy to mess up. After debunking your first 5 or so you get tired of reading the examples and finding the mistakes, and then having to convince someone thatt they made a mistake and getting yelled at for being a physics drone. although I must admit I started two threads like this once upon a time One in which I was arguing that potential energy didn't exist and anouther in which I was arguing that a photon had mass. I eventually learned I was wrong. PS We should start a pseudoscientists anonymous

mowgli the spot will still travel faster than light if you start the beam at the center, since there is no relative motion of any physical object there is no relative time, although in the case of a flat ceiling as the beam moved right the dot would tend toward c from above (the angles get shallower) also in order to make sure that were all on the same page lets use a circular ceiling in the future (one whose center is the laser pointer) because it seems like were getting additional complications in this discussion by using a flat one. Besides were looking for whether the dot can exceed the speed of light.

alright I'd buy that for the case where the beam is at the left hand corner and moves to the right, but if it started at the center ie perpendicular to the ground, the same thing wouldn't happen. but I guess were in agreement now though so its all good.

but thats the thing, we have to. Consider the example of three countries, A B and C (insert your own names) B is located directly between countries A and C. C launches a missle barage at A. A feels that the threat posed by C can't be stopped without a full scale invasion to find and destroy all of C's missles. B refuses to allow troops from A through their borders. Now A say's that B is supporting C by its refusal to do anything to help A eliminate the obivious threat of C, so B is really in cahoots with C and they should be dealt with accordingly. ^we all know why the above scenario is idiotic, but if you think about it, a terrorist group is really just a group of people inside a country. that country is like B in the scenario, because while the country that was attacked would have to go through them in order to get at the terrorist group. The country itself cannot allow troops from anouther country to into them to conduct what amounts to a police action inside of their borders, doing so would be tantamount to surrenduring their sovernty (sp). Now some countries are more apt than others at removing terrorist groups than others. Countries like lebanon and syria would'nt be able to remove the terrorist groups within them even if they wanted to, so they don't really bother trying. Now the down side of treating the country as if they were equal to the terrorists that operate within their borders is that an invasion of such a country creates more resentment and thus more terrorist groups against the country launching the invasion. This creates a ceaseless cycle of violence that continues until the invading country loses its will and money and goes home. Case and point the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and The US invasion of Iraq. The one thing that President Bush is spot on about in the war on terror is that it is a new kind of war that is being waged against an enemy that knows no borders. So Why are we fighting a war with borders.

mowgli I think there was a bit of confusion, me and 5614 were thinking that the laser was already on and had made a dot on the ceiling, if you look at that way then we should be in agreement (I'd be very interested if we saw two dots on the ceiling when the laser was moving if it had been on to begin with)

the only reasonable method of harvesting energy from the gravitational potential that I can think of would be to fly out to the asteroid belt (or the oort cloud) and destabalise a few asteroids orbits so that they fall back towards the sun (passing by the earth). then either slam the asteroids into each other and harvest the heat or slow them down with a powerful magnetic field and get the energy out of that somehow.

how can you be sure that your theory is correct then as it doesn't seem to have a basis in the other laws of physics. If its not based in those than its most likely not consistent with osther theories and is wrong.

5614 is right, once the dot starts moving the dot will move faster than c (as long as the laser instantly started rotating at 85 degrees per the unit time that 5614 gave before) you can treat the laser as a bar and get the same general result as if you did the problem while taking into account the travel time between the laser and the wall. if anybody has the abiity to create an animation out of the polar equation [MATH] \theta =\omega t[/MATH] and R=Ct it would show how the dot moves quite well, but if nobody has the ability to do that someone could post the graph of R=C/omega t which should show the spiral that a light pulse would follow as it left the laser.

norman albe is your work based off any of the currently accepted theories? or did you strike out on your own making up the math as you went?

the function is defined as mat(n,n) to mat (n,n) I was a bit dubious of having the H's stick around in the derivative, but if you guys say its ok than I'm sure it is, I guess the thing that annoys me about this book is that it handles everything in a very abstract way without using physical examples to illustrate the point (like the motion of a particle)

hmm so my new vector calc book essentially uses linear approximation and derivative interchangably, this seems entirely contrary to everything I've ever known about derivatives and everything else. is this the way I should be thinking about them or am I being led astray? I'm a bit nervous about it all as some of the "derivatives" seem like they would hold true in general however others seem a bit hodgepodge take this for example. what is the derivative of the mapping of a matrix A to... [MATH] (AA^t+A^t)^-1 [/math] now I struggled with this one for a while and apparently went way off track. the solution manual says that the problem should work like this (I think I can get better if I just get some clarification on whether or not this is an actual derivative or just an approximation) break it up into two functions f(B)=B^-1 and [MATH] g(A)=AA^t+A^tA[/MATH] that seems all well and good but then the author does a few things that seem a bit iffy. in order to find the derivative of g(a) he writes g(A+H)-g(A), he essentially calls this the derivative, but in order to simplify the expression he distributes the transpose operator as shown below [MATH] (A+H)(A+H)^t=(A+H)(A^t+H^t)[/MATH] is that a valid operation? well anywho he goes on to set the value for the derivative he got to be equal to the increment in the derivative of F(B) so essentially the derivative boils down to -F(B)H*F(B) or -B^-1 H B^-1 with B being equal to g(A) and H being equal to his derivative of g(A), so is this all right or....

its not really that much of a change, because whenever you here the thought experiment laid out it involves a random number generator, or something similar to that. I just defined a time interval for the number generator. And the result would be true regardless of the interval for the number generator as were talking about infinity here. bascule: I like it

although putting it on a physical timer has the advantage that it won't be software locked, so someone looking to undo it would probably get a pretty big headache trying. depending on your reasons for locking the computer this may be a good option.

alright so I have a t-shirt that says on the front "shrodinger's cat is dead", then on the back it says "schrodinger's cat is not dead". Mildly clever and good for a moments laugh but it gave me the idea for anouther t-shirt that would read on the front "schrodinger's cat is dead" then on the back "no, schrodinger's cat really is dead" then would follow a long and extensive proof saying that schrodinger's cat is dead. In order to make it so that schrodinger's cat is going to be dead I'm altering the thought experiment so that every second a random number generator spits out a one or a two, if its a one then the toxic gas isn't released and the cat stays alive, if its a two then the gas is released and the cat dies. now since the probability of scoring a series of consecutive ones for an arbitrarily long period of time is given by (1/2)^t the probability that schrodinger's cat is dead would be given by 1-(1/2)^t given the limit of t to infinity you can see that the probability that schrodinger's cat is dead tends to 1. My problem is that this is really simple and not quite fitting of a physics t-shirt. So I want to know if anybody has a far more complex looking proof that would say the same thing, I would hope to really get into the quantum stuff but I don't know if it can really be applied. Now as we all know the key to making a good math/physics t-shirt is to have it be easily explainable but very complex looking. SO a few greek letters and integral signs help a great deal.

no it wouldn't but that still doesn't change the fact that that is what happens in a meterial with a negative index of refraction.

I think I'm going to be takeing calc 3 physics 3 (heat etc.) differential equations linear algebra stat 1 discrete mathmatics (maybe) oh yeah klaynos are you taking all those courses in the same semester? and what school do you go to?

I honestly think that if there wasn't a unifying threat like israel in the middle east then most of the islamic jihadists would turn on eachother over there own religious differences. As recent events in Iraq have shown the internal differences among radical islamists are a much greater threat to them than a benevolent force such as the US occupation force.

heck why bother beating around the bush and just call it BC and AD, we all know that thats what the dates are really supposed to mean anyway

I think he's coming to terms with the very real possibility of an iranian invasion following a US withdrawal. Just think about it, in a few years when the US makes its withdrawal we will leave iraq with a military just large enough to give the government some legitamacy. And there will still be a large chunk of shiites in the country who would welcome an iranian theocracy. As for the Iranians I'm sure they would be happy to gobble up iraq, remember that the same leaders are there today as those who fought Iraq in the 1980's. And with a few nuclear bombs behind them an exhausted US wouldn't do anything more than fire off some missiles and push for international sanctions. ^while I do believe that the US would do more than what I outlined above the fact that the above seems so reasonable is cause for alarm. But I'm sure that these thoughts have crossed the mind of the Iraqi Prime Minister and faced with that threat he may be trying to bring the Iraqi government into line with the Iranian government.

essentially you just run water over a nuclear reactor and use the heat to break the chemical bonds. I think water breaks down at 2000 degrees or so but I'm not sure.

mmm.. delicious

IMM read my posts. I never tried to draw any comparisons between holocaust victims and stem cell research. not once. I was critisizing a comment made earlier in the thread that went something like doesn't bush realise that in order to progress a few have to be sacrificed. that's paraphrased because I no longer have the inclination to properly justify myself in order for someone else to misinterpret a single post in the thread and then post something like the above.